The author with her husband, Asher and his brother socially distancing next to her sister, brother-in-law, and Asher’s three first cousins. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Yashari/ Rachael B Photography It’s becoming increasingly harder to find joy these days. Loss lurks around every corner; the loss of actual lives, the loss of what we thought life would look like, and the loss of simple, carefree, physical togetherness, unencumbered by a hypervigilance around health and safety.
Our family has been extremely lucky thus far in this pandemic. My husband and I have secure jobs as physicians, we manage child care, and we and our loved ones have remained healthy. Our greatest loss has been that we had to cancel our son Asher’s bar mitzvah on May 9, which was to be an afternoon service followed by dinner and dancing that had been in the works for over a year.
When we realized we wouldn’t be able to celebrate Asher in the way we originally had planned, we felt conflicted. Facing the unprecedented challenges of our current reality, our options were to move ahead with a virtual ceremony or to postpone for a prolonged period of time. Neither satisfied what felt most meaningful to us about Asher’s bar mitzvah: to have friends and family (including all of his grandparents) share in the experience of marking this milestone — both in spirit and physically. And so, like our Jewish ancestors have done during periods of change and hardship, we adapted.
Behold, Asher’s “car mitzvah,” a drive-in movie-theater-style bar mitzvah. We transformed a rooftop parking lot into an outdoor sanctuary. We had 100 guests in 35 cars, a masked rabbi, a masked cantor, two masked musicians, a large stage to allow for physical distancing and two LED screens onto which the service was projected.
People tuned in to an FM radio station to listen. Guests ate prepared food and drinks in their cars. Families took car selfies in a virtual photo booth that were uploaded onto the big screens so everyone could enjoy seeing who was there. As a family, we drove around the lot in a yellow golf cart, greeting guests along the way.
On the invitation, we promised a “physically distanced, emotionally intimate” evening — and it was. There was a palpable magic in the air. The combination of hearing our son’s exquisite voice chant Torah into the night sky along with seeing grandparents seated at social-distanced tables in the front row — their eyes welling with tears of pride and joy — was perfectly imperfect. It was an important reminder that as Elie Wiesel once said, “Even in darkness, it is possible to create light.”
To seize the moment and make room for joy and gratitude alongside pain and loss is a fundamental Jewish practice.
Having to adjust to life not going the way I thought it would go is a process with which I have more experience than I would like. Fourteen years ago, I discovered I have an ultra-rare, adult onset, progressively debilitating muscle-wasting disease. Over time, my body is slowly losing its physical strength. I constantly am faced with the same challenge: how to allow in the extreme emotional discomfort that accompanies each devastating loss without letting it consume me. Being truly present and engaged with joy, no matter how painful the circumstances, is transformative. At Asher’s ceremony, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I forgot about my disease.
Initially, we had our reservations about having a celebration of this scale during this time. It felt somewhat incongruous to plan to gather for celebration, yet it felt equally life-affirming. To seize the moment and make room for joy and gratitude alongside pain and loss is a fundamental Jewish practice.
Asher’s car mitzvah was imperfect and we did it anyway. It took a lot of hard work, patience and planning but in the end, we persevered. While cars horns honked and headlights flashed as we joyously sang “Siman Tov u Mazel Tov,” it felt nothing short of miraculous. This is the spirit of resilience during these unprecedented times that we wanted to offer Asher as he became a bar mitzvah. We hope that it always will serve as a reminder to him that it is not what happens in life that matters as much as how we cope with and adapt to it.
If planning a “car mitzvah,” click here.
Jennifer Yashari is a board-certified psychiatrist in private practice in Los Angeles.
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